Artwork For Sale Biography
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In 1955, the weekly general-interest magazine The Saturday Evening Post asked readers to select their favorite cover by the magazine’s star illustrator, Norman Rockwell. The image known as “Saying Grace” won overwhelmingly. It depicts an old lady and her grandson absorbed in prayer before lunch at a railway station diner, their bowed heads attracting bemused glances from an assortment of men dining nearby. A typically Rockwellian rendering, “Saying Grace” persists today as a masterpiece of the artist’s oeuvre. In December 2013, it was sold at Sotheby’s for $46 million, a record-breaking sum for an American painting.
The sale of “Saying Grace” coincided with the publication of Deborah Solomon’s new biography of Norman Rockwell, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. Hailed as “a revelation” by the New York Times and “brilliantly insightful” by the Wall Street Journal, the book unveils the idiosyncratic life of an artist whose primary subject was carefully observed scenes of wholesome Americana. Solomon, a critic and biographer of bona fide modernists Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell, is one of a cohort of revisionist historians who’ve helped to firmly entrench Norman Rockwell in the story of twentieth-century American art. It has been a dramatic reversal for the wiry, pipe-smoking illustrator, who, during his lifetime, was derided and dismissed by an art world smitten with Pollock’s paint splatters and Rothko’s planes of color. While abstract expressionism reigned, Rockwell was, Solomon writes, “viewed as a cornball and a square…a convenient symbol of the bourgeois values modernism sought to topple.”
American Mirror conveys that Rockwell’s vignettes of cheery neighbors, precocious boy scouts, and gossiping grandmothers held—despite a lack of support among professional critics—mass appeal with an American public seeking comfort in a fantasy of coherence. It also argues that while Rockwell’s paintings depict an America replete with communitarian optimism, the artist’s own life was far from picturesque. Rockwell’s childhood was marked by feelings of inadequacy and alienation that Solomon suggests he strived to reconcile throughout his adult life. Social anxieties left him most comfortable alone in the studio, but even there, he was compulsive about cleanliness and “the most nervous of realists, a painter who felt vulnerable when he shut his eyes.” His residence in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, was the location of his therapy sessions with the famed psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and Rockwell’s relationships with women appear to have been largely dysfunctional; in Solomon’s account, he felt greater intimacy with his studio assistants and male models.
The book explores questions about Rockwell’s sexuality, taking note of the particular care he labors on young boys in his paintings and how much of his work portrays male togetherness with an absence of women. A hunting trip during which Rockwell and his assistant Fred Hildebrandt skinny-dip and share a bed provides more fodder. Solomon deliberately avoids the word “gay” and states that “there is nothing to suggest that he had sex with men.” Nonetheless, the book has ignited anger among members of the Rockwell family, who claim Solomon’s speculations are untrue and dangerous to Rockwell’s legacy.
I spoke with Deborah Solomon at her Upper West Side home on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in 2013. Midway through our conversation, her son, home from college for the holiday, walked in and dropped his bags. Solomon stood up from the couch to embrace him, and their fluffy dog ran over to join in the communion. Outside, a storm was brewing. But the apartment, filled with art books, paintings, and photographs, glowed with familial warmth. It was something out of a Norman Rockwell.
—Meara Sharma for Guernica
Guernica: You begin American Mirror by admitting that you didn’t have a Norman Rockwell poster in your bedroom growing up. Rather, you had a poster of an abstract painting by Helen Frankenthaler, the color-field painter. Who was Norman Rockwell to you, long ago, before this book?
Deborah Solomon: Have you noticed that a lot of biographies open with the writer proclaiming a lifelong attachment to their subject? I didn’t have that with Rockwell. I’m not going to pretend that I pored over his covers at my kitchen table when I was five years old. I majored in art history at Cornell and was taught that Jackson Pollock was the savior of American painting. Why? Because he shifted—it was always said—the capital of the art world from Paris to New York.
Rockwell was not a part of my early education or my consciousness. During the heyday of modernism, he was viewed as a lowly calendar artist, an illustrator for the Boy Scouts and The Saturday Evening Post, a toxic culture polluter. But his reputation deepened with the advent of postmodernism. Robert Rosenblum—the great art historian and Picasso scholar who’s no longer alive—did a retrospective of Rockwell’s work at the Guggenheim Museum. That was in 2001. I was blown away by the show.
In many ways, magazine illustrators are supposed to be forgotten over time. That is the definition of illustration. Like a newspaper article, a magazine illustration is supposed to convey a piece of information to the public and only last until the next one is published, the next magazine or the next day’s newspaper. It’s not supposed to last forever. So the question about Rockwell is why are we still talking about him thirty-five years after his death? And why has his work turned out to have the mystery and staying power that one expects of the abstract painting of his era.
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Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Artwork For Sale Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
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